We know that the poor, on average, eat less well and less healthy than the rich. The general diagnosis for this imbalance is that there are “food deserts,” places where, for some reason, the capitalists and entrepreneurs just refuse to sell healthy food. This doesn’t quite make sense: as if there was a demand, then capitalists would be just as happy to profit off poor customers as the rich. Greed is greed, after all.
Fortunately, economists have studied this issue. Their inquiry reveals that when we take poor people out of these “food deserts,” their diet changes a little, but not very much, indicating that geography is not to blame. It’s not all about money either, for the purchasing of cheap and nutritious food is entirely possible, as the diets of our own grandparents and beyond show. Today’s poor have purchasing power far greater than the average income two generations ago and more than nearly any income group four generations ago or more.
The actual answer is that the poor, in those supposed commercial wastelands entirely free of a fresh vegetable or fruit, prefer the diet they eat. This, not “food deserts,” is why there are fewer businesses offering them healthier fare.
There is no blame to be attached to this, either. For here, as so often, George Orwell was right: If you’re doing heavy labor — what the poor tend to have to do in our societies — and haven’t got much money to spend on anything at all, then what food you do buy will be comfort food. Great big plates of calories and fats and oils and sugars. Exactly the stuff that just tastes good to the human palate: Recall, evolution means our baser tastes were formed among those permanently on the edge of hunger at least, if not near starvation.
Which is why poor, hard-working people eat this way. It may have changed from Orwell’s time a fair bit, swapping the English style of tea into soda pop, corned beef for canned meat, and so on. But we are indeed complaining that the poor are eating the kind of food that would rarely cross our own tables.
Which brings us to the real importance of this research: why people have the food habits they have. It isn’t ‘food deserts’ that explain the working class’s less-than-healthy diets, it’s choice and desire. Thus government programs, special subsidized shops, and vouchers for extra fruit and so on all aren’t going to work. It’s not availability nor price nor knowledge at fault here, it’s that physical work plus tight budgets that make this a desirable style of diet.
Thus to change this, we need to make the poor richer. Thankfully, we’ve known the process for how to do this for the past couple of hundred years. Diets get better as people become richer, and greater incomes come from more capitalism, more globalization, and the spread of free markets.
Why wouldn’t this be the case? It’s exactly what has made the middle and upper classes’ diets so much better than those of our ancestors. To think that we’re somehow different in base motivations and reactions than those still poor is the very worst form of elitism. So, the solution to the bad diets of the poor is more neoliberalism, odd as it may sound at first.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
